FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Conservative shareholders at eight major corporations have filed resolutions urging those companies to stop using politicized tools like the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map,” which added Turning Point USA a few months before the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
The Heritage Foundation and portfolio manager David Bahnsen, which have held thousands of dollars in shares at each of the companies, filed the proposals last week.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated October as Hate Crimes Awareness Month—but few organizations have sown more hatred against fellow Americans than the SPLC itself,” Heritage Chief Advancement Officer Andrew Olivastro told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “It doesn’t fight hate—it manufactures it, embedding division into every press release they issue and every word they post; their business model is defamation, and America is finally waking up.”
“Companies are now rightly distancing themselves from the SPLC, recognizing that its model is not only flawed but dangerous,” Olivastro added.
“As someone who lives in Alabama, right in the SPLC’s backyard, I’ve seen its nefariousness up close,” Allen Mendenhall, senior advisor for Heritage’s Capital Markets Initiative, told The Daily Signal. “The assassination of Charlie Kirk has made tragically clear what conservatives have warned for years: When groups like the SPLC equate mainstream conservative beliefs with hatred, they help create a culture of dehumanization with deadly consequences.”
“No company that truly wants to combat hate should rely on the SPLC, which absurdly lumps groups like Turning Point USA and Alliance Defending Freedom with the Ku Klux Klan,” Mendenhall added.
The Heritage Foundation filed resolutions with Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Mastercard, Meta (Facebook’s parent company), PayPal, Salesforce, and Starbucks. Bahnsen filed a resolution with Texas Instruments.
The Southern Poverty Law Center gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy, and now it publishes a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian groups alongside Klan chapters. A terrorist used the “hate map” to target the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., for an attempted mass shooting in 2012, and while the SPLC condemned the attack, it kept the council on the map.
The SPLC added Turning Point USA to the “hate map” this summer, a few months before the assassination of Kirk, Turning Point’s founder. The SPLC condemned the assassination, but has yet to remove Turning Point from its map.
In recent years, the SPLC has added parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty to the “hate map,” along with groups of doctors who oppose “gender-affirming care,” conservative Christian nonprofits including Focus on the Family, and even the nonprofit PragerU, best known for producing 5-minute educational videos.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/10/19/manufacturing-hate-conservatives-pressure-companies-drop-ties-splc/